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I think saying that the rent is market rate doesn’t really eliminate the transfer of value away from WeWork shareholders. First, you can’t exactly calculate market rate, and rates are normally determined by a negotiation between multiple parties. When you own a rental property, you take on a risk of vacancy while seeking tenants who pay your idea of market rate. You will face the choice of taking a lower rent vs. staying vacant and holding out for more. If Adam Neumann is getting reliably paid a healthy market rate by WeWork, and WeWork is taking the hit from the vacancies, he’s getting one over on WeWork’s shareholders. Lease obligations are going to be paid out before equity. Perhaps that’s the whole point of the arrangement.

Are you counting the run up to the current prices in your 10% return calculation? That seems kind of circular.

Gaslighting is where an abuser says and does unexpected things that make the abused doubt their perceptions and sanity. I learned about it in film class in college. Suddenly people are using the term to describe all sorts of actions that don’t seem to fit that mold (but that involve some sort of ill intent). What gives?

The post you responded to said the president can’t block people, so yes you’re able to read his posts. The only thing stopping you ought to be your desire to maintain sanity.

I agree with your take on human psychology, but I don’t think you’re right about it requiring infinite growth. If I get a new phone every year, that’s not actually growth. That contributes the same amount of GDP each year. People can get change without growth.

Can the counterfeiter just copy your new SKU?

From practical experience, it’s very common for people to find their phone (iPhone or other) burning through tons of battery when they go out in the sticks, and this is reliably fixed by turning off cellular data. So either it’s not as easy as you say, or they haven’t bothered solving the problem.

I have some friends who have said it to me in person too. I wonder which of them are the shills?

I think police searching databases for low-quality evidence like tire track, shoe prints, and fiber analysis is a very dodgy practice, for these exact reasons. The key is the specificity of the match, and I don’t think facial recognition is good enough. Fingerprints and DNA can be, but there are still known cases of people being falsely charged based on databases searches with a partial match.

This tech can be good if applied to a narrow range of people like you suggest (eg. only searching people who live in neighboring blocks) but nobody is actually doing that. We should pass laws requiring a rigorous analysis of these probabilities for such databases to be used, including a conversation about what rate of false positives we are willing to tolerate. Guardrails should be put in place to enforce those limits. If this is too hard, we don’t have a strong enough handle on this technology to be using it.

Here’s the scenario that scares me the most:

Police identify a suspect using facial recognition. Then puts that person in a lineup for a witness. Of course the witness is going to say “that’s the one!” because the suspect actually looks like the perpetrator. The witness will be sure, the cops will be sure, and a jury will convict. And this scenario is completely determined by the use of the facial recognition database. This will happen unless we pass laws to prevent it.

I’m concerned because probability is not intuitive.

Suppose a store is robbed, and there’s a video.

The police identity some suspects - the guy who just got out of jail for robbing the same store, and another person the store owner had a dispute with. Neither of them look like the robber in the video. Then the police take a still from the video and knock on some doors around the block. Somebody recognizes the person in the video, and the police investigate that person. This scenario seems pretty fair to me.

Now suppose the police run it through the facial recognition system. It identifies one person as a 99% match, and the police go investigate this person. This scenario does not seem so fair to me.

Here’s how I see the math:

P(A) = P(robber has a doppelgänger living on the same block) = .01

P(B) = P(robber had a doppelgänger somewhere in the database) = .9

P(X) = P(police screw up investigation, and will convict the suspect whether or not they are guilty) = .2

P(AX) = .002

P(BX) = .18

The exact numbers are made up, but as long as P(A) << P(B), you can see you this tech will result in a huge increase in false convictions. Even if P(X) is low, the number of false convictions increases by P(B)/P(A).

The way it was explained to me is: you use the Gilead card to pay you copay, and that counts toward your deductible. So, my last post was wrong to use the word “reimburse”.

My friend who’s on a high-deductible plan says they reimburse you for the portion that’s before your deductible. It’s actually kind of a sweet deal because you hit your deductible without being out any money. Then you don’t have to worry about paying for medical care for the rest of the year.

Presumably people are unsubbing all day.

If n is the number of emails and k is the number of unsubs, it adds up to O(n) to check the table of unsubs before sending vs. O(k*n) to scan the queue after every unsub.

Or, to be less computer-sciency, a task that scans the queue of emails every time someone unsubs would be a pain to keep running. Elsewhere in this discussion the queue was described as a file. Who wants to scan the same file over and over all day?

These other devices are all cheaper and less popular than the iPhone. This quarter the category that includes the AirPods and Watch made one fifth what the iPhone did. To contribute 10% of company revenue growth, this category needs to double. Maybe the category has room to double once, but will it 10x over the next five years? You would need performance like that to justify a high PE ratio.

AAPL seems to have hit its peak in the device market, and can only grow revenues at this point by effectively raising prices on existing customers (that’s what the services category amounts to). This strategy can only take them so far.

We don’t seem to have trouble producing any number of things that depreciate in value: cars, furniture, computer. The ROI is in the difference between the cost of the inputs and the cost of the finished product.

The problem with housing is that efficient use of one of the inputs (land) is illegal. Fix this and housing will be available at a variety of price points, just like cars are.

I was right there with you until the last three words. Investors ought to be compensated, but there’s no particular reason that compensation should be greater than the inflation rate.

FYI google recently increased the limit to 5 mins. I found out when my streams stopped failing at 60 seconds :)

Also, they definitely have incremental updates.